Over the past few weeks we have come to the phase of our recovery project, where we needed to put up some ceilings in our new shed.With such high ceilings, I realised that I needed to borrow some scaffolding from my friend, a semi-retired builder, who had this gantry set sitting idle. The gantry, allowed us to get up high safely, and being on wheels, it made moving around the room so much easier. I am so grateful to my friends for all their help over the past 17 months of our ordeal. We wouldn’t be so far advanced in our recovery without all of you and your generous and thoughtful support.
To get this difficult job done as safely and quickly as possible. I decided that I couldn’t do this part on my own as I have with most of the other trade-related tasks. I employed our wonderful brick layers and electricians for this same reason. I could have completed those jobs on my own, but I would still be at the beginning. There are just so many man-hours involved in building a project like this. So to this end, I employed my friend Andy and his off-sider Tim, for 4 days to help me get the ceilings done. One ceiling per day more or less, but we did a few other difficult jobs as well while they were here, Many hands etc. With these two young blokes up on the moveable gantry and me on the ground cutting, prepping and passing up the materials. They were free to stay up there and get the job done efficiently. I learned this when I used the gantry myself last month to secure the tallest sheets of gal iron sheeting that I put up on the walls of the very tall maintenance shed. I spent more time climbing up and down the scaffold than I did actually working up there.
Tim and Andy were terrific and I didn’t get worn out as part of a 3 man team, although I was very tired by the end of each day and had to have a lay down before dinner. Now our ceilings are almost finished, I can stand back and admire what we have achieved. Two of the ceilings were made of corrugated iron sheeting, using up the last of the recycled roofing that I recovered when Andy and I demolished the old feed mill factory in Moss Vale. The other two ceilings were made of quite thin plywood. Not my preferred choice, but the best of a poor bunch of options that were available to us on our tight budget.To save money, I searched out some quite thin 4mm bracing plywood at just $11 per sheet. This is just one third of the price that the big hardware stores are charging. It is so thin, that is it easily deformed by the weight of the insulwool above it that it is supporting. But I can live with that.
These sheets are intended to be used as bracing ply, and are not meant to be seen. They are not even flat, but quite wavy, even when laying flat on the pallet. I have attempted to minimise some of this wavy distortion in the ceiling, by adding pine cover strips that we milled ourselves from the dead pine trees next to the house that were killed in the fire.The pine strips don’t stop the distortion, but by creating a straight line next to the wavy ply, it distracts the eye from the unevenness and will stop the ply from distorting more over time from the weight of the insulation. A cheap and creative, but effective solution to a difficult problem.
I’m not too concerned about my cheap and amateurish look of this choice of ceiling wood work. If I were building a brothel, where 50% of the customers might be staring at the ceiling, then it might concern me!
But this is a pottery shed. No one will be looking at the ceiling!
Janine and I have been painting all the multicoloured different hued sheets of re-cycled corrugated iron sheeting that we used internally as lining for our shed. I spent 3 or 4 months collecting old roofing iron off a lot of buildings from Sydney to the Highlands. I spread the word among my friends and students. I would come and collect what ever was on offer.
Sometimes, I’d get a call in the morning saying you need to be here between 3 and 4 this afternoon, you can have the roof and we’ll help you load it, but if you aren’t here, it will all go to the tip. We can’t store it here on the building site. And I did, some of it wasn’t much good, but I could select was was useful to me and take the rest to the recyclers.
We ended up with a dozen or so different styles of old corrugated roofing in every imaginable colour, from straight silver-metal zincalume, through red, green, blue, brown, yellow and grey.
I chose to use the sheets in the necessary lengths required in each position. This resulted in a mix of rather unattractive colours that didn’t sit well together. We decided that we would have to paint it all one colour to get some aesthetic cohesion. Even if the profile of the different sheets, manufactured in different decades, by different companies, didn’t fully match, resulting in some rather big gaps in the overlaps. Well, beggars can’t be choosers!
We gave the room a first coat of very cheap ‘Aldi’ flat white acrylic to bring all the sheets to the same base colour. Then to save money, we bought one 4 litre tin of cheap commercial ‘pink’ tinted flat plastic and made our own blend of 3 parts, Aldi cheap white acrylic that just happened to be on special in the week that we needed it, and one part of the tinted pink paint. We ended up with a very pale pink that looked like a warm white. You can only tell that it is a pale pink, by comparing it to a otherwise supposedly ‘White’ test sheet.
Two coats of our cheapskate, ‘poverty pink’ and the room looks good and completely consistent in colour. We have gone through 16 litres of paint to get all 4 of the quite tall 4 to 5 metre high walls coated. Good value at $120.
Looking out of the big arched window that I made for the ‘gallery’ room. I can see the Balmoral Railway Station out in the garden. We bought the old Railway Station by tender, back in the 1970’s when the Railways Dept. had closed the line to passenger traffic, and kept it open as a solely goods line. They decided that they wanted the un-used timber stations removed from the line and the site cleared.
We thought that this was a shame, as the timber railway stations form part of the fabric of village history. The Station at Hill Top, the next village along the line, was the first to be sold off. It went for $2! the people who bought it only wanted the tin off the roof to build a chook shed. So they took the iron off the roof and burnt it down. That cleared the site, and fulfilled the contract! The what a shameful event.
We decided that this wouldn’t happen to our village station. When ours came up for demolition, we tendered to demolish it, but instead we picked it up in a couple of huge wire slings, lifted it onto a low loader and re-located it to our own back yard. That fulfilled the contract to clear the site. But most importantly, it preserved this valuable part of our village history for some time to come. The station building dates to about 1880 and although it is only small, we decided that it was too important to be destroyed.
Incredibly, it almost burnt down a few times during the catastrophic bush fire that raged through Balmoral Village on the 21st Dec. 2019. Embers lodged in the roof facia board and it caught fire. I was lucky to manage to see this early on and managed to hose it out before it spread to the whole of the roof. I was simultaneously fighting the fire that had caught hold of my barn at the same time and had t keep returning to the water tank on the station building to refill my buckets, because the pump on the barn had failed after half an hour. I saw the station roof burst into flames again, and again hosed it out. With the wind howling and the air temperature very high, and the constant shower of ember shrapnel flying through the air, my hair even caught an ember and caught fire at one stage. It’s impossible to forget the small of burning hair!
Even though I hosed the fire out very well and soaked the area around the fascia of the station roof. It soon dried out in the hot gale and burst back into flames. I had to return and put it out several times.
So I saved the Station – for a 2nd time.
Looking out at the station through the tall arched window from this newly painted white room. I am suddenly reminded of the lines of a song from my teen years, “In the white room, with no curtains, by the station” There was something else about tired starlings. but the important part is that we have a white room with no curtains, by the station.
We have been working on the tools, brick cleaning for the past 3 weeks now. Last week, my wrists began to ache, so I stopped and had a 3 day break to let them rest. Our friends Rei and Fran called in on Monday to give us a hand and I did my share, but that night my wrists swelled up and ached, so I realise that I have reached my limit on brick cleaning. I’ll need to have a few weeks off now to let them recover. We got 2,200 bricks cleaned, so we are about 2/3 of the way through the job, an average of around 100 bricks a day. Not too bad, but obviously too much for my ageing body – at this time of great anxiety and stress.
Instead of brick cleaning, I finished off the claywater/greywater drainage system, digging the trench from the pottery studio to the seepage trench by hand using a crow bar and shovel. Interestingly, this didn’t hurt my wrists the way that chipping away at lime mortar does?
Once the sewerage line was completed, I turned my attention to the LP Gas line. We hadn’t fired our LP gas kiln for the past decade, as we were trying to minimise our use of fossil fuels. But the gas bottles still have gas in them and I’m planning to build another solar electric kiln using gas reduction at stone ware temps. There are so many services that need to be buried all around the building, I’m trying to get these done, I’ve finished the storm water and guttering, so all that remains to be dug in and buried is the fresh tank water supply to the sink. This has to come all the way around the building from the 2 big rain water tanks next to the barn. I want to get all this done so that I can finish the ground works around the building and start to clean up the site. The LP Gas line comes from the 2 big gas bottles past the studio and around into the court yard then up and over the verandah and into the kiln room. I’m really proud that I have been able to achieve this complex installation using only two tools, a coil bender and an expander.
With this minimal tool set, I have been able to make all the elbows and joiner parts necessary for the job from simple copper pipe. I’m using thick class B pipe and 5% silver solder for all the welds, as required by the Australian Standards. The only parts that I will need to buy are the 2 end threads to screw on the LP Gas connection fittings. Miraculously, my ancient 1950’s oxy set and the 2 gas bottles survived the fire because I wheeled them out side into the paddock and wrapped them in a piece of 1/2” ceramic fibre blanket. The fire raged past and over them and didn’t even melt the plastic hoses, such is the insulating value of ceramic fibre in the short term. It saved me too!
I’m not real fast, It has taken me 2 days for this job, but I don’t charge myself anything for my time. One of our past pottery students is a plumber and he has agreed to come and test my line and certify it if it passes, then connect the kiln for us. I saved myself a lot of digging by using the existing stormwater trenching for nearly all of the underground work. Another of our past students, Tony, a retired builder came and installed the glass french doors. These were donated to us by another ex-student Geoffrey and his wife Sue. They bought the doors 2nd hand and Geoffrey cleaned them back, reglazed and puttied them, then undercoated them. Only to realise that they didn’t really suit what they had in mind and found them to be excess to their requirements, so donated them to us. Tony did a wonderful job of installing them, which required moving one of the studs and me making a new steel header beam and then some new steel door jambs out of 3mm thick gal steel plate, so as to save using a wooden door jamb to save the extra space. This was the only way we could fit them in. They look great and let lots of light into the building. We are really pleased!
I also finished the back verandah with the help of my friend Warren last Sunday. I had made up all the parts to make a new ‘portal frame’ to finish the job that the builders said couldn’t be done. I used the off cuts from the 3mm thick gal steel plate that bought for the french door jambs, and cut out and folded the parts for the frame myself, using the guillotine and pan break, watched over by the always attentive chickens, Gladys and Edna.
The back verandah is now complete and weather proof. The brickie that we originally had come out ond look at the job, has now said that he can’t do it. A shame, but I have been in touch with a couple of younger guys who are interested. One says that he can start in 4 weeks, so the pressure is on to get the last 1200 bricks cleaned in 4 weeks! We’ll see what we can do. That’s 50 a day, 25 bricks each. It may be possible? 10 before breakfast, 10 before lunch, and 5 before dinner. We have a few weekend working bee’s organised, so that will take some of the load off our wrists.
Today I didn’t clean any bricks. We had an almost full day yesterday when 2 friends came and gave us a hand for most of the day. Janine and I did our ‘normal’ shift from 6.30am till 9.30, then our friends came at 11.00 am and left at almost 7.00 pm.
We did have a long lunch, but it was still a big day on the tools. So today is a designated day off from brick cleaning. Our first
The electricians turned up, so that was good. It’s nice to see some progress. I spent the morning helping them by digging out the old pottery 3 phase cables down to 750mm. deep and exposing the horizontal run of the orange conduit. The sparkies then joined on a longer section of cable and ran it up the outside wall of the Gallery room, and then along to the new main sub-board inside.
My next job was then to fill it all back in again, after laying a sheet of orange ‘warning-electrical cables’ plastic safety strip along the trench, half way up. By doing these mindless labouring jobs myself, it saves paying the high hourly rate to the sparkies, for something so dull and time consuming and saving me some money.
I will need to make some new corner flashing out of gal steel sheet to cover this conduit and make it safe and weatherproof.
The sparkies continued on inside wiring the rest of the building.
Progress in fits and starts. I’m grateful for every little bit of it.
We have been working consistently on the brick cleaning, with have had a couple of friends come and give us a hand during the week and that has sped things up quite a bit. Janine and I have been at it every morning for a few hours from 6.30 to 9 or 9.30. We regularly clean our quota of 100 bricks to stay on target of finishing by the end of the month. With the little bit of help from our friends, we are now well ahead of our target. We had 3 friends here yesterday, so knocked off 300 bricks before lunch.This has brought us to about half way through the cleaning job. Ahead of schedule is a good place to be.
On the other days, we only had Gladys and Edna to help us.
We came across a really lovely example of the blue mould on one brick, with some green moss. I sent a photo of it to my friend Warren. He sent back an image of a pile of his bricks that are a stunning example of both the blue mould and bright green moss.
We work for a couple of hours every morning from 6 or 6.30 until 8 or 8.30, depending on when we wake up.
We do at least 100 bricks before breakfast. Our brick cleaning tally stands at 600 bricks now. I was thinking at the beginning of this little project that I had over 3,000 bricks to get done. I’m an ageing old man, maybe 100 per day would get them all done in a month. Achievable, without doing myself an injury. So, all in all, I think that we are doing pretty well.
There is a gap between the bench and the brick pile now. That’s progress made tangible.
We were joined this morning, very early on by half a dozen wood ducks, they came wandering past grazing on the grass and made their way up to the front of our land where I planted a patch of clover.
Janine wets the bricks down with some water every now and then to suppress the dust.
Yesterday, I started the day with a new set of scutch combs in the hammers and by the evening they were reduced to being pretty blunt, so I reversed them to get another day out of the the other edge.
Slowly but surely, we will get it all done. The 42 oC temperatures haven’t helped, but we are in for a cool damp change tomorrow, so I might be swapping my home-made Legionaires style, adapted sun hat for a rain coat. At least it will keep the dust down and be so much cooler.
I improvised it by fixing part of an old T shirt to my straw hat with some of Geordie’s old nappy safety pins. Needs will, as needs must.
On Wednesday afternoon, my neighbour Mitch called in with his excavator after he had finished work on another job.I had asked him to come when he could just a couple of days earlier. We needed a seepage trench for the pottery sink to be dug 10 metres long and at least 600mm wide and 600 mm. deep. This will be for clay water/grey water seepage.I felt that as the weather is getting hotter and I’m wearing down. I copped out and got the trench dug. But it is money well spent. Mitch dug the trench in just 10 minutes. It would have taken me all day – and then some. 3.5 cu.m. of crushed stone gravel is about 7 tonnes of material.
Yesterday I was in town, as I had a favour to repay and then I was off to Moss Vale to the plumbing supplies to buy all the parts for the seepage trench. Today, with everything in stock, we lined the seepage trench and built the stop ends/access/inspection ports, then filled 5 of the 7 tonnes back in again. A big day in the hot sun. We still have a couple of tonnes left over to deal with.
I’m so glad to see the end of that job. It was over 30 oC here today while we did all this digging. After we finished all the earth works, we watered the garden and I picked all the days garden produce.
I picked tomatos, zuchinnis, capsicum, cucumbers, chillis and artichokes. This will be dinner. Janine cooked a vegetable risotto for dinner, while I made a big 5 litre stock pot full of tomato passata. We had our risotto with a small piece of fish, fresh off the south coast fish truck yesterday.
As the building of the new pottery shed has progressed in fits and starts, I have been busy on several fronts, working behind the scenes doing several jobs in preparation to keep the build progressing, by making windows and doors etc. Two weeks ago it was the stormwater plumbing and at the end of the week, the Council Building Inspector came out and passed the building up to the frame stage and also passed my underground storm water plumbing.
The last two items to be completed and inspected will be the sink, grease trap and drainage/absorption trench. I asked the inspector if i could do all this work myself and he said yes. I can do it all, I don’t need a plumber to sign off on it. So next week I will attempt to dig an adsorption trench 600mm. x 600mm. x 10 metres long and bury the plastic hoops necessary to create a legal drainage system for the sink. I have done all this before over the years, firstly for the first bathroom at the front of the house in 1980, and then again for there new kitchen/laundry/bathroom extension in 1990. It’s not rocket science. Just grunt.
The last inspection will be the final inspection. This will be after the electricians have been and the shed is lined inside with insulation in the walls and with the brickwork completed on the front wall. This will take some time to get done.
This last week I was hanging doors on the front and side verandahs. This has been one of those little jobs that have been idling along in the back ground for the last couple of months. I collected these couple of old doors years ago, just because they were really beautiful objects, even though I didn’t need them at the time. They were too good to pass up.
These days when I drive past piles of other peoples junk on the foot path, waiting for council clean-up. There is nothing worth taking home and re-cycling. It is all just so much plastic and chip board pulp waiting for land fill. The only lasting thing about Ikea furniture is the allenkey!
I found one of these old doors 20 years ago, in ‘condom ally’ in Darlinghurst, not far from the National Art School. I used to go there because it allowed all day parking for free at time when there was no space in the Art School. Someone had dumped the door on the side of the ally. I don’t know which house it came from, but it must have been posh as the door is massive. 2.1 metres x 1.2 metres and 55mm. thick. All in Australian cedar, but it had had a hard life and was pretty knocked around. The top two wooden in-set panels in the 4 panel door were smashed out. I saw it and put it up on my roof rack straight away. It sat there all day without being stolen back. So I drove home with it that night.
It sat in the wood shed for years and survived the fire last year. Our friend Megan Patey came to volunteer here one day earlier in the year and asked for a suitable job. So Janine and Megan cleared out the years of built up clutter that had made it’s way into the wood shed and Megan dragged out these two doors. That was a couple of months ago, and I have been tinkering away on them ever since.
The other door was collected off the side of the road on a Council Clean-up day. I saw it and stopped. Checked it out. It was dirty and damaged with the glass panes broken and missing, but it still had one small lead light intact on the top left side. The other 4 panes were smashed. I could see that it was made of Californian red wood timber and was massively thick at 65mm thick! It’s the thickest door I’ve ever handled. It was also stored in the back of the wood shed and survived the fire. So now I know why I saved them all those years ago. I would need them for this last pottery building.
I started cleaning them both back, removing decades of built-up dirt and layers of paint. some of it possibly lead based, considering their age. I worked out side and wore a mask and gloves, just in case. The big cedar door didn’t look good after cleaning. it was too far gone. A lot of splits and cracks and weathering. I decided that the best option was to paint it. I filled all the cracks with polyester gap filler mastic and undercoated it.
The other door was quite badly weathered on the outside face, to the extent that the patina of crackled and flaked paint and slightly exposed patches of bare wood had a very subtle ‘wabi-sabi’ feeling about it. This green-yellow-mustard-grey-brown patina of multi layered flaking paint matched some of the old rusted galvanised iron that I had collected. This combination was too good to waste. I decided there and then that this was the gal iron for the verandah where this door would be hung.
I prised the wooden beading out of the frame holding the lead light in place and moved it to the centre position, then got two new plain glass panes to fit the other two spaces where the other lead lights had been smashed. It came together quite well I think.
The door knock and letter box slot are just the right combination of yellow brass, red copper oxide and green copper verdigris.I fitted two large panels of laminated safety glass in to the middle two openings. They had been wood in the past, but rather than having wood there. I decided that the door worked better with glass in this instance.
I decided to paint the massive cedar door bright red and use it as the front door facing the street. It looks good, but strong red needs a little bit of black to contrast against it. So I fitted a very old lock that I scrounged way back in the 70’s. I could never find a place for this lock, as it was just too big for any normal door. Finally it has found its place in life. I see a red door and I want to paint the lock black!
My friend Jack Cookson, and I made a key for it.
I think that it works well with the old cast iron door knob, that came off the side door to the old pottery. I recovered this from the ashes after the fire, along with the old cast iron knocker. Just enough black to off-set and highlight the bright red. A little of the old incorporated into the new.
Here again, I decided that the door worked better for us here with glass in the two upper panels rather than wood.
Where the latch key lock should have been. There was a circular hole in the door, regrettably, much too close to the door frame to fit a standard ‘lockwood’ style lock. So I decided to deal with the hole by filling it. My very good friend Warren recently came to give us a hand for a few days of his Xmas holidays. So generous of him! We got a lot of stormwater plumbing done. Warren came bearing gifts! One of his clients had given him a bottle of French ‘Pol Roger’ Champagne for Xmas and he decided to bring it down and share it with us. It was very nice. I saved the cork. Janine realised that the initials on the cork ‘PR’ was not too dissimilar to the clay stamp that our teacher, good friend and mentor Peter Rushforth used on his work, so I incorporated the cork into the door as a little tribute to Peter and Bobby.
This new pottery now has embedded into its structure a load of references and links to our personal history, and our friends past and present. We are ever so grateful to all of you out there who have turned up to give us a hand along the way on this difficult and trying journey.
Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts.
We spent the last week digging 150 metres of trenches. Digging all around the perimeter of the new shed and then down the hill to the big water storage tanks. These water tanks have not had any water flowing into them in 12 months, not since the previously pottery shed burnt down.
Fortunately, Our friends Stu and Robyn Have a half share in a trenching machine and we were able to borrow it for a while to do all the really heavy work, but there is still a lotto getting down on our hands and knees to d the clearing out and lifting difficult flat iron stone rocks that get in the way.
I almost got all the plastic piping installed before a big dump of rain. That put an end to our blur-glue plumbing work for a while. This week I am teaching a Master Class at the Hazelhurst Regional Art Gallery in Sydney, so there will be a weeks wait before I get back to the rather aromatic, acetone based, blue-glue and white plastic plumbing pipes.
Bit by little bit, we make slow progress. we got 120 metres of pipe in the ground before the storm stopped us. I’d have preferred to get it all done before this week-long teaching hiatus interrupted the work. However, I’m very pleased to get the gig. This will be the 8th year straight that I have taught this summer school MasterClass. I’m starting to run out of special techniques that students haven’t been exposed to previously. It has become my way of easing out of Xmas/New Year holiday mode and back in to clay work, but this year it’s more of an interruption to my labouring/building work.
It is strange in the extreme to realise that I have spent a whole year without making a pot. I haven’t touched clay since last years Master Class. This makes me more of a fraud than a master! However, I’m pretty confident that I will have the pottery built and fitted out by the middle of the year, or thereabouts. I’d really like to think that we could have new work for sale by the next ‘Open Studios’ Arts Trail event on the first two weekends of November.
Who knows? It’s a small ambition. But a lot of work to get there. The next step is to get the electricians in to do the first fix wiring. This has to be completed before we can insulate and line al the walls. The insulation and lining has to be completed before we can start to build shelves and benches etc. Then we have to rebuild our kilns…
We are only 10 days into summer and we already have both our first tomatoes and now our first peaches. We’ve been picking zucchinis and cucumbers for weeks already. Nothing quite like the flavours, tastes and aromas of the summer garden. Although this all sounds idyllic, it’s possible because of the worlds unabated consumption of carbon based energy. With global heating racing away, unabated like it is and coupled with an embarrassing total lack of political will here in Australia. We also have to accept the changing weather patterns associated with all this heat, like catastrophic bush fires and massive storms. From someone who has lived through a catastrophic fire event. I can clearly say that I’d rather not have to experience it again and the early tomatoes are not worth it.
Back in the garden, the pumpkins that I planted on the 12th of September are now 3 months old and taking over the bottom of the garden.
From this to…to this!They are setting a nice crop.
Strangely, we are just harvesting our citrus crop now almost half a year out of seasonal sync. We should be picking them in the winter. Everything has been dislocated by the extreme weather and the catastrophic fire event. All the citrus got burnt, some very badly, such that we lost half of the trees facing the pottery as it burnt. The citrus grove was planted next to, and on the north side of the pottery, using the building to protect the trees from the worst of the winter’s southerly winds. Sheilded in this way and facing the north winter sun, they were in a bit of a sun trap and it suited them very well. We had good crops.
After the fire we watered them well for the first few weeks, whenever we could find the time during the clean-up. Sometimes this meant in the dark before dinner at 9.00pm. The result was that they all re-shot leaves, some only on half the tree that wasn’t so badly burnt. They went on to flower again as if it was a new year, but totally out of sync. We got the strange out of season crop and they then flowered again out of sync, such that we are now harvesting again in summer and not winter.
The entire right hand side of this tree was so badly burnt that it has remained completely dead and needs pruning off. I’m hoping that the tree will eventually put out new shoots on the right hand side and balance itself up.
Apart from the strangeness of it all. They are probably suffering from PTCD. Post Traumatic Citrus Disorder! Also, when the fruit is ready, it isn’t the usual colour. For instance, the tangelos are pale yellow like lemons instead of bright orange. While the lemonades are green like limes instead of yellow. Strange times. I assume that they will slowly revert to the normal seasonal flowering and fruiting regime over time?
All the peach trees were burnt in the stone fruit orchard, but just before the fire. I had lifted two of the smaller trees that were doing very badly in the draught, as I couldn’t keep enough water up to them. I put one of them into a big plastic tub that was hanging around and the other into a large synthetic plastic fibre plant bag that someone had given us. I placed them in the veggie garden where I could water them better, just to see if they would survive. They had recovered well and are now ready to plant out again, but because they had flowered and set fruit, we thought it better to let the fruit ripen and plant them out next winter when they will be dormant.
The out come is that we have a dozen small peaches ripening. Amazing!
The out come is that we have a dozen small peaches ripening. Amazing! And so unexpected. Janine also picked the first apricot off one of the newly planted stone fruit orchard trees. Where the trees were doing well and growing strongly, I left one piece of fruit on each tree that I thought could cope with a ripening fruit and still grow well. That applied to one apricot, one almond and two apple trees. I just couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing and tasting the new fruit varieties.
The pottery shed is slowly progressing. Today the builders are putting the roof on the pottery studio. That is really good to see. It was ready to roof yesterday, but it was windy and slightly foggy and damp, making it too slippery and too difficult to roll out the silver roofing insulation in the wind. Today is calm and overcast but not wet, so it’s all go on the roof. I can hardly wait to get inside and see how the light is in there. We now have two roofs on. the kiln room and the creative studio.
I spent a long time working out how to get the best light, at the lowest cost, but not interfering with the structural strength, allowing for enough metal strap ‘X’ bracing, covered with corrugated sheeting to provide sufficient structural wind resistance strength. I’m no engineer, but the shed company’s computer program allowed me to input different options, increasing the glass area until the ‘Computer says No!’
Edna the Chook, came in to check out the new studio too.
I then worked backwards from there, to find the biggest size of standard ‘off-the-shelf’ cheap aluminium windows that would fit the space. No use in paying double to get a custom window made that is only 100mm larger. So I back-tracked down to the best available size. We ended up with 4 windows that are 2.4m. x 1.2m. (8 feet x 4 feet) plus a sliding glass door that is 2.4m x 2.4m.
It will end up darker inside when it is lined and not so oppressively metallic and shiny.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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